Posted!

Join the Conversation

Prison Book Project doesn’t forget inmates

By Troy Moon;, tmoon@pnj.com;
11:11 p.m. CST February 9, 2014

Volunteer Johnny Ardis addresses and packs books recently at Open Books as part of the Prison Book Project. Each week, volunteers gather and pack donated books to ship to prisoners across the state.(Photo: Photos by Ben Twingley/btwingley@pnj.com)

Cheryl Poister searched the back wall at Open Books in Pensacola, trying to fill requests from prisoners incarcerated across Florida. It seems one prisoner in Lake City, a former Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University student, wants to learn difficult subjects usually taught in institutions of higher learning, not correctional institutions.

“We do have ‘Calculus and its Applications,’ ” said Poister, 66, a retired educator who has volunteered at Open Books for about three years. “This person really wants to keep his mind busy.”

The man is just one of the hundreds of prisoners incarcerated across the state who count on the volunteers at Pensacola’s Open Books to help feed their minds while their bodies are imprisoned. Open Books, a nonprofit, volunteer-staffed bookstore at 1040 N. Guillemard St. in Pensacola, operates the Prison Book Project, which sends books to prisoners across Florida.

Prisoners must write the Prison Book Project to request reading material. And every Wednesday, Open Boos volunteers go through the letters and search in the back where books reserved for inmates are kept on various topics from horror and westerns to educational and religion. Then they stuff books into manila envelopes and mail the books — a limit of three per mailing — to the inmate. The Prison Book Project has operated in Pensacola since 2000.

It began at the now-defunct Subterranean Books in Pensacola, the brainchild of husband and wife Scott Satterwhite and Lauren Anzaldo. Satterwhite worked at the bookstore. And when Subterranean Books closed, Satterwhite and others opened Open Books in 2007, moving the Prison Book Project there. The bookstore is open seven days a week, selling donated hardbacks and paperbacks at discounted prices. The money raised through book sales is used to pay for mailing and operational costs of the Prison Book Project, and also to pay rent on the property.

Johnny Ardis, a longtime volunteer with the Prison Book Project, said the project doesn’t just benefit Florida’s prisoners. It benefits society as a whole.

“Most will be getting out one day and coming back to the community,” Ardis said. “This way, they may learn some things that might benefit them when they get out. Their disposition might be better. If benefits society as well as prisoners.”

Ardis said the Prison Book Project is similar to other prison book endeavors in other states, and that most inmates know of the project and how to contact Open Books. Some write short letters requesting material. Others pepper their letters with words of thanks. Some make their own cards to send to Open Books to show appreciation. One inmate in Lake City made a card featuring Bart Simpson in a prison outfit and chains.

On the front, the inmate wrote “Been Meaning To Stop By.” Open up the card to show the chained Bart Simpson and it reads “But I’ve been tied up lately.”

“We get all sorts of cards and art from prisoners,” said Andii Johnson, a volunteer who catalogs the backlog of prisoner letters and checks their current status on computer databases to make sure they’re still at the correctional facility they wrote from.

Their are hundreds of backlogged requests. Open Books receives about 10 requests a day, but it can only fill about 30 to 50 requests each week because of mailing expenses. Inmates can make requests every six months.

“It’s hard to keep up,” Johnson said. “It costs us a lot of money to get them shipped out.”

The bookstore and the Open Book Project run on book donations from the public. The store is usually well stocked. Even if a specific request can’t be made, volunteers can usually find a book from the same author or in the same genre.

“We send them something,” Ardis said, while looking over a request from an inmate in the Gulf Coast Correctional Institution near Panama City. “This guy wants books like ‘Lord of the Rings’ and Robert Ludlum books.”

Moments later, Poister located two Ludlum books for the inmate, and a copy of “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkein, who also wrote “Lord of the Rings.”

“This is the only Tolkein book on the shelf,” she said. “It will have to do.”

Poister said the project gives hope to many who have little.

“The people in prison need to know people on the outside care about them and give a damn,” she said. “Education is the key to life.”

Open Books

» Open Books is located at 1040 N. Guillemard St. Hours are noon to 5 p.m., seven days a week.

» Book donations are needed and accepted. Volunteers package books for the Prison Book Project at 6 p.m. each Wednesday.